You have accessed the RobCo84
database, here you will find various information,
opinions and news all relating to the world of Fallout.
This is not an official site but my hope is that the
public ideas published here will be noticed by someone
important, this is the aim of my web site. Also having
played through both Fallout RPGs too many times, if you
need help or advice with the game I'd be happy to help.
Just e-mail me.

NEWS

May 21st

I am currently looking for a
couple of programmers or modders who would be interested
in helping me for a project. The brief is to create a
Fallout Tactics game set in Britain, with the working
title "Fallout: The Exodus". The aim is to tell
the story of how the war came to Britain and will involve
Gangsters, Mutants and the Metropolitan Juristiction. If
anyone is interested please email me at Baronfunk@Hotmail.com.

My hope is to find some partners
for this project and I don't wish to act as a boss in
anyway, this is purely volutary work and the editors need
to be released yet. But I would like to get the storyline
and mission plotting designed first and i will need help
with this as well.

May
17th

As
you probably already know, last Sunday we published a
story about the Micro Forté office in Canberra closing
down. Several different sources said that the entire
Fallout Tactics team had been "let go", and
nobody knew exactly why.
Our attempts to contact Micro Forté went without
success, and lot of people resigned themselves to
thinking that they would never get to install the new
Fallout Tacitcs patch or play around with the highly
anticipated editor. Morale was low.
Therefore, it's a great relief to be able to say that the
very dark situation we all feared may not be so dark at
all.
Whilst there might have been some kind of commotion down
at the Canberra office last Friday, it appears that
nobody lost their job, and the company certainly hasn't
closed down. The Fallout Tactics team still have a base
of operations to fall back on.
We don't know what happened exactly, all we know is that
"the situation is fine". There's still no
official word, and we'll be looking for a press release
to reassure us, but nonetheless it's definitely
encouraging news. We can all relax a little and breathe
easier - maybe that editor isn't so out-of-reach after
all.

May
13th

Important
news for all Fallout Fans, its a bit long but worth it!
Read This!!

You
guys don't need to worry, it's going to be cool. It's not
going to be the same game that the original Fallout's
were, but I think that is a good thing. We've learned a
lot about making games in the past few years, and we are
going to apply that to the Fallout series. Is it going to
be a little more faster paced in combat - of course, it
has to be because we can't make a solely turn based game
anymore. But, we talk all the time about how to keep it
from becoming a Diablo type game as well. That is not to
say that we've started making Fallout 3, it's just
something that we talk about a lot.

Well
the tough thing is that at some point most games will
have to go 3D. We are trying to make the jump now rather
than later. It has not been easy, and we are still
working to make TORN look as good as possible - the
current screen shots are certainly not there yet. I'm
hoping we can get it up to the standards of Icewind Dale,
and each day it is getting closer. If you are curious I
can go into some more detail as to why almost everyone
eventually has to go 3D.
As for turn-based vs. real-time it is a very tough
decision. I really enjoy turn-based games, but the
unfortunate thing is that game making is a business. On
average, a real-time game sells more than a turn-based
game. Since we have to sell between 150K to 200K units
now just to earn back what it takes to get a game on the
shelf, we need to look at what features can get us there
and what features might not.
And I do agree with you that real-time can make combat
less strategic. However, we are really trying to come up
with ways to combat that and keep combat interesting.

Hmmm...
It is hard to figure out what is the best solution to
making games like TORN and Fallout 3. I totally agree
that the screenshots of TORN are not there yet, and the
guys have been working the last month straight to get
them looking better.
I can totally see how a lot of you feel that Fallout just
won't be Fallout without a turn-based mode. It's a very
hard call. I guess I feel that if we can keep the mood,
look, quests, open-ended nature, and the complex
character development of Fallout, then having real-time
pausable combat will not make it an un-Fallout game. I
could be totally wrong and it just won't work. However,
it's something we have to try so that we get to make a
next Fallout game.
I guess how I look at the real-time vs. turn based thing
is that we just can't do turn based anymore and have
enough people buy the games to make us able to keep on
making them. However, I really don't think that the real-time
of the Infinity Engine was a total action game. I know
there are a whole lot of Diablo players that won't touch
the Infinity Engine games because they think combat is
too slow and not "actiony".

The
reason we turned away from the Fallout engine in part was
not just due to the engine itself, but also how the game
was made. A big part of a game's success is the usability
of the tools. For their day the Fallout tools, and I'm
mostly talking about Mapper, were awesome (Jesse Reynolds
did a good deal of the coding for it). However, they were
really the first generation of game tools.
The problem is that since then we are dealing with more
data, larger teams, and translating the game for the
whole world - the tools need to be much better and they
need to integrate seemlessly with a backend database to
keep track of everything. Through the use of a lot of
different technologies we've been able to build a new
suite of tools/editors that actually make making games a
whole lot easier. As an example, in Fallout the dialog
had to be coded into the scripts for each character. It
had to be translated by hand from a text file into code.
For TORN, we have a dialog editor that works directly
with MicroSoft Word to have a spell checked dialog
imported directly into the game. What this gives us is
far more efficient designers. So, we can in essence make
bigger games with the same number of designers. Or at
least that is the hope.
If we had tried to keep on retrofitting the Fallout
engine to support new tools and technologies it would
have become a coding Vietnam. Code bases only last for so
long, because people remember less and less about how
things work in the engine and the engine becomes more and
more like magic. People are afraid to touch it, and we
can change it less and less.
I guess lastly, my hope is that we create a true Fallout
game. The Lead Designer, most likely, will be Chris
Avellone, who was the Lead Designer on Torment and the
twisted mind behind New Reno in Fallout 2. If there is
anyone outside of Chris Taylor who understand the Fallout
universe it is him. He certainly isn't going to let us
make an unFallout game. I was just reading a fifty page
document today about the Fallout world timeline, and his
thoughts on keeping the world continuum going.

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